Laid off? Share the pain

Kuder, one of the laid-off Yahoos, began the fateful Feb. 12 as just a regular tech guy with 87 people tracking his tweets. Soon word spread of his brief but entertaining updates on meeting with human resources in a conference room called Lucy, bidding friends farewell and handing over his security badge ("Will I be able to get a latte for the road. . . . ?") By the end of the next day, he had become a minor celebrity, with a following of more than 400.

Self-broadcasting what is usually a private experience gave Kuder more than 15 minutes of Internet fame. It gave him solace, and, more important, job leads. The San Jose husband and father of two was flooded with "positive tweets" offering support as well as connections via social networking services such as Facebook and LinkedIn.

"I thought the reaction would be a couple of 'Hey, good luck' messages, and 'Let me know if I can help' from people already following me," Kuder said. "Instead, it got picked up around the world. There were even blogs written in Chinese, Japanese, Dutch and Spanish. It was fascinating to watch how things spread like that. My wife keeps saying I planned this. I wish."

That sense of online community has become pervasive as more people venture online and the technology advances, said Vanessa Fox, features editor for SearchEngineLand.com and an entrepreneur-in-residence with Ignition Partners, a venture capital firm.

"The Web has given us a way to connect with others. So we put our thoughts out there so others can read and identify with them, but also for the possibility of response," Fox said. "With a place as large as the Web, we're bound to find others who have gone through and who understand exactly what we're going through, and many deem it worth the trade-off of putting ourselves on public display to become part of that."

No one knows that better than Susan Mernit, who was a product team leader at Yahoo Personals with a strong background in social media. One hour after she was laid off on the same day as Kuder, she decided to test the power of such tools. She posted the news on her blog, added a tweet to her Twitter stream and updated her Facebook status. In five hours, her experiment delivered immediate proof: 100 responses from friends, colleagues and strangers who, as readers of her blog, felt connected to her.

"I had no idea that it would be communicated as broadly or quite as publicly as it was," said Mernit, who lives in Palo Alto. "Social media accelerated the reach and the speed with which I could communicate what happened to me."